ON STAGE THEATER & MUSIC. MUSIC/ PLAY ON.

Mayer's lush songcraft wins over fans

March 08, 2002|By Greg Kot, Tribune rock critic.

Save for Lilith Fair's cavalcade of guitar-strumming chanteuses, the '90s were a tough decade for singer-songwriters, with most introspective voices drowned out by the din of grunge, pop-punk and rap-rock.

That didn't discourage John Mayer, whose self-released debut album emerged at the height of Limp Bizkit mania in 1999. "I started writing the type of songs I wrote because I couldn't find anyone else writing them," he says from his tour bus, which will bring the 23-year-old Atlanta resident to the House of Blues for concerts Friday and Saturday.

"I will never be Lenny Kravitz," the singer declares. "I don't have that chunka-chunka riffing. I am not a chunka-chunka kind of guy. If anyone accuses me of playing `light rock,' I'd have to say, `I most likely do.' Because I like the interplay between lush sounds, but without cliches. The easier a song is to sing to someone the first time you hear it, the quicker it will be gone. The good song has to have that one moment that makes you go, `Ahhhhhhhh!'"

His first album, "Inside What's Out," didn't contain enough of those rapturous moments, by Mayer's own admission. But its blend of pop, blues and jazz held enough promise that he was signed by Chicago-based Aware Records, which put out "Room for Squares." As the buzz around Mayer intensified, Columbia Records picked up the album and it's fast approaching 200,000 sales while the singer steadily fills concert halls nationwide.

Mayer won over his audiences one e-mail address at a time. He has been collecting names after shows for years, and communicates with his fans daily. Though to his chagrin some of his early recordings have surfaced on the Net as unauthorized MP3 files, he says the virtual connection to his fans is the key to his success.

"To a lot of people, my career is predicated on nothing but sound," he says. "There is no image, no marketing attached to an MP3 file. They just have the song on which to decide whether they like my music or not. That is the strongest connection you could have with somebody."

Mayer's strongest musical bond was forged as a teenager, with the albums of the late blues-rock guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan. "Pretty soon my whole day was based on that moment when I got home from school and could play my guitar," Mayer says of his youth in Connecticut. "I spent a lot of time involved in the depths of playing one of Stevie Ray Vaughan's songs. That's what the blues is about: getting better at expressing the same thing instead of moving across a linear landscape of music. I learned it's not about how fast you play the song but how deep."

Tantalizing hints of that vision surface on "Room for Squares," which is more about compact songwriting than open-ended guitar excursions. More persuasive is a companion EP, issued with the first 50,000 copies of the album, in which Mayer covers Vaughan's "Lenny" and Jimi Hendrix's "The Wind Cries Mary." That gift for improvisation, and the full breadth of his talent, doesn't become apparent until he's experienced live, where he explores the inner workings of his sturdy tunes in a way not glimpsed on his albums -- at least so far.

"It just made sense to me to make a record that doesn't expose what my ceiling is," the guitarist says. "I wanted my first record focused on songs, and I wanted people to wonder what else can happen."

The strategy has paid off, as Mayer's emphasis on melodic richness, lyrical incisiveness and airy arrangements has tapped into a growing audience. Along with contemporaries such as David Gray, Pete Yorn and Ryan Adams, he's proving there's still a place for tuneful introspection on the commercial horizon.

"People have always been hungry for songs -- it's just a matter of exposure," Mayer says. "It's a trend now, but I don't think the trend has dictated the art. There's a certain job security I have, because you can't fake writing good songs. With rap it's about the beat machines, and anyone can get one. But it's going to be hard to inundate the market with thoughtful songwriters, because there just aren't that many. People who are rising now were writing good songs when Limp Bizkit was the biggest thing on Earth. Now Limp Bizkit is a punch line.

"It's a testament to being patient. You stand there long enough and do good work, people will eventually find you in the pop supermarket. Me and Pete Yorn and Ryan Adams and a few others have been hanging out by the freezer section while the program directors from radio stations came by in their aprons stocking up on what's popular and saying, `Sorry, it's just not time.' And we answer, `No hurry. Come back tomorrow and we'll still be here, doing our thing.'"